Tech Talk Column

Paraphrasing the former US Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are pr…

In technology and innovation, it can be as much about when as it is about what. Six years ago, I was involved with a charity event and a standard recipe for such an event was for an auctioneer to take the microphone and spend thirty minutes trying to…

For over one hundred years, pragmatic advice freely handed out to people or organisations in a seemingly doomed situation has been “if you can’t lick ‘em, jine ‘em.” I suspect that was the logic applied in the latest mov…

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” It would be hard to imagine what Newton would think, almost 350 years later, of how the world of technology has taken to heart this concept of building upon previous k…

Great! There is a new app I want to use that all my friends are talking about. I can hardly wait to download it and start using it. Terms and conditions, I hear you say? Ha! Who has time to read all that legal gobbledygook? I am sure it will be OK an…

Toyota has just started testing a new Prius with a solar roof that will be used to charge a plug-in battery. With the increased efficiency of solar panels, it makes sense. To give you some perspective, the amount of power that hits the earth’s …

Woohoo! I just won my grocery supply for the next year! With four hungry kids our grocery bill is a significant expense in our household. I can hardly wait to see those free groceries appearing at my doorstep. I’ve been waiting for a week now b…

I remember growing up playing the board game Monopoly. It was as much a psychological experiment with family and friends as it was a game. The analysis started when the tokens were chosen. Battleship – cutthroat. Boot – grudge. Car &ndash…

I am sure you remember the old trick question that your science teacher gave you at some stage during your high school education. Which has more mass – a kilogram of feathers or a kilogram of lead? Along those same lines, which is of more value…

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…my taxi! We haven’t noticed any people from Krypton flying around our skies but we are certainly closer to the world depicted in The Jetsons, the animated sitcom that…

iTunes is dead! Long live iTunes. Apple recently made the announcement that they are killing off iTunes. Oh no! What will happen to all my downloaded music? What about the songs I copied from CDs onto iTunes? My playlists!!! Firstly, we should look a…

On 9 April 2013, then Federal opposition leader and eventual Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, made a broad statement referencing the NBN. “[We] are absolutely confident that 25 megs is going to be enough, more than enough, for the average household…

I have seen a total of approximately one minute of comedian Rick Mercer’s TV show and it was thirteen years ago – but that video clip has stuck with me since then. Wind the clock back to 2006. The world was yet to see the iPhone. 4G was s…

I recently wrote a poem called ‘Tomorrow’s Smartphone User’ and it focused on the fact that a modern smartphone has so many wonderful features that it may be easy for a smartphone user of the future to forget that it is still capabl…

In my formative years, I learned that a true test of character is how someone behaves when no one is watching them. It would appear that lesson was not widely distributed because the latest data on dashcams is quite interesting. More on that in minut…

Well I have good news and bad news. In the lead-up to the 2007 Federal Election, we heard the vision to commence construction of a super-fast National Broadband Network (NBN) as Australia was lagging behind the rest of the world in Internet connectiv…

Now we tend to think of our big four banks as, well, big. CBA; Westpac; ANZ and the NAB sit at numbers one; three; five and six respectively on our ASX200 by market capitalisation. And then there is Apple. To give you some idea of size, their market …

One of the greatest challenges for lawmakers across the world is keeping up with changes in technology. Nowhere in the job description of a tech innovator does it mention that they should hold back on new ideas until legislation can be put in place. …

Time for me to do my best impression of Adam Savage. I want to bust a few myths today. There seems to be so much discussion around the technology associated with electric cars at the moment – and I struggle to find data and facts in amongst the…